


armed and dangerous

by AlyLily, gwenhyneargwenhyfar, Pachimew



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, all of you Need To Know that the doc is named "WE STAN A PROSTHETICS-WEARING QUEEN", ambs: "ok so an au where jasnah has sick prosthetic arms", bryn: "so an au where she's edward elric"
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-12 18:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19234996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlyLily/pseuds/AlyLily, https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwenhyneargwenhyfar/pseuds/gwenhyneargwenhyfar, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pachimew/pseuds/Pachimew
Summary: Navani’s daughter was born with almost everything you’d expect babies to have, perfectly formed--a cherubic face, ten perfect, tiny toes, smooth and flawless skin, all those things people said about babies.Except for one missing thing.Two, actually.Her arms.





	1. gotta hand it to her

Navani’s daughter was born with  _ almost  _ everything you’d expect babies to have, perfectly formed--a cherubic face, ten perfect, tiny toes, smooth and flawless skin, all those things people said about babies.

Except for one missing thing. 

Two, actually.

Her arms.

\--

“I’m making her arms, Gavilar,” Navani said. “She needs arms.”

Her husband rubbed his forehead, an annoyed expression on his face. “Yes, of course she does,” he said irritably. “But anything you make her will be, what, stiff imitations of them?”

Navani drew herself up to her full height, managing to look down at Gavilar despite being several inches shorter.  _ “I  _ am an artifabrian, husband,” she said. “The arms  _ I  _ make her will not be imitations. They will be  _ workable.  _ And if I sacrifice some beauty for them to work, I  _ trust  _ that will not be a  _ problem.” _

Gavilar raised his eyebrows at the threat in her tone. A spark lit in his eyes. Fortunately, not the embers of anger--no, if Navani was reading this right, she’d just reminded him of why he loved her.

“Of course not, wife,” Gavilar said.

* * *

 

 

“You’re making  _ arms?” _ said the ardent. 

“Yes, for Jasnah. Do try to keep up,” Navani said absently, shifting a gemstone carefully into its housing.

“She’s a  _ girl _ . Why are you making two? She doesn’t need a left arm.”

Navani turned slowly in her chair. “Almighty help me, if you say anything like that again, these pliers will go somewhere they aren’t supposed to. Got it?”

The ardent paled rapidly and nodded. “Yes, your highness.”

Navani smiled. It didn’t reach her eyes.

* * *

 

The arms were works of art.

They may not have been  _ aesthetically _ beautiful, but that didn’t matter.

Smooth, seamless, Soulcast wood flowed into aluminum housings for gemstones on the shoulders and at the joints, moving with a range of motion that, while perhaps not fully human, would certainly suffice for Jasnah.

...It really was a shame her two year old child would probably outgrow them within a few months.

“Alright,” Navani said, looking at Jasnah as the toddler examined her newly fitted arms with her usual strange intensity. “I admit I may not have fully planned this out. But I did it once, I can do it however many times I need to.”

Jasnah looked up her silently and smiled, waving her arms. Navani’s heart swelled, and she wasn’t sure if it was love for her child or pride in her work.

Well. Those two things didn’t have to be mutually exclusive.

 

* * *

 

“Jasnah,” Navani scolded. “What have I told you about messing with your arms!”

Jasnah, now nine years old, looked up innocently from where she was cutting a hole in the middle of her left arm to put a ruby from--was that one of Navani’s prototypes sitting dismantled in the corner? 

“Not to,” Jasnah answered primly, “but Mother, I can light things on fire with this!”

Navani sighed. “Lighting things on fire with your arms isn’t going to find you a husband or teach you the skills you’ll need in life.”

Jasnah scowled at the floor. “Setting men who want to be my husband on fire sounds like a good life skill to  _ me,”  _ she muttered.

Her mother hesitated. “I mean, it probably is,” she admitted. Jasnah sat up triumphantly. “But that doesn’t mean it’s safe for a nine-year-old.”

“Mother,” Jasnah said in what was clearly  _ meant  _ to be a reassuring tone, “I am  _ very  _ smart. I know what I’m doing.”

“Your arms are made of  _ wood,”  _ Navani pointed out. Jasnah looked slowly down at them.

“...Actually, I had some ideas about that,” she began. 

Navani knew this was a tactic to distract her. If she let Jasnah talk, she would be inevitably distracted by her daughter’s ideas and end up forgetting to lecture her.

But for all that she knew that, Navani couldn’t help being curious.

She’d ask right after she was sure Jasnah had gotten the point.

 

* * *

 

Jasnah looked at the ruby vein on the inside of her arm. It ran along the length of her forearm from a central gem set in the bend of her elbow, ending at her index finger. If this went right, she planned to add other gemstone veins to her other fingers. She wasn’t completely sure what they would do yet, but she did, after all, have ten fingers to experiment with. One for each of the Essences. She was sure she’d figure out  _ something,  _ and then maybe move on to experimenting with combinations with different fingers activated…

But first, she had to make sure this worked. Jasnah pressed the ruby in her forearm. A moment later, a soft red light ran down the vein, and the piece of paper she held between her thumb and index finger burst into flame.

She grinned. She was going to have _fun_ with this.


	2. arming the children

Many years, two explosions, and much refinement later, Jasnah still kept the ten-Essence vein pattern in every new version of her arms. Her mother would occasionally present her with less... _ customized  _ arms, still works of art in performance (and now, in beauty too; Navani had gotten very,  _ very  _ good at making arms over the last nineteen years), and Jasnah would take them and smile and rip them apart to add in her usual set of adjustments by the end of the week.

This was about to be a very good move, if not necessarily a wise one.

“Look,” Amaram said. “You need to get married to someone. I’m the best choice.” She scoffed and turned to leave. He grabbed her arm. “I’m  _ talking _ to you.”

“Don’t  _ touch  _ me,” Jasnah snapped. Amaram had grabbed near the top, unfortunately, and the outer plate blocked him from hitting any of her gemstone veins. She snarled and yanked her arm out of his grip, turning it carefully so that the veins were in view. “I’m warning you, Meridas,” Jasnah said, hoping her icy tone would cover the slight shake in her voice. “Leave. Me.  _ Alone.” _

Amaram’s face twisted in a scowl. She turned to leave, keeping her arm carefully positioned so it was the easiest thing to grab for.

And like the fool he was, he grabbed it.

Amaram screamed in immediate agony and more than a little regret as the ruby veins lit up and a jet of flame burst from her fingertips, searing his face. “You--”

“I  _ warned  _ you,” Jasnah snarled. “Take this lesson to heart, and do. Not. Try. This.  _ Ever.  _ Again.”

He was too busy whimpering in pain to respond. Jasnah strode out, spine straight and shoulders held stiffly.

* * *

Her five-year-old cousin reminded her a lot of herself, or at least what she was told she’d been like at his age--the quiet intensity, the endless curiosity, and the ability to poke into exactly the places he really shouldn’t be poking at.

She had underestimated him, or perhaps overestimated his innate common sense, and wasn’t paying all that much attention as she let a fascinated Renarin play with one of her older arm models while she tinkered with her usual set. She had some ideas for this one.

There was a soft  _ fwomph.  _

Jasnah spun around and yanked the spare arm away from Renarin’s face, the jet of flame scorching the floor instead. Renarin had burned off one of his eyebrows, but it looked like she’d caught it before any lasting damage was done.

Jasnah held her breath, waiting for him to cry. She would be in  _ so  _ much trouble with her mother. 

Instead, Renarin poked at his face for a moment, then giggled. He reached for the arm again, and she yanked it away before he seared off his remaining eyebrow.

“You are a very strange child,” she informed Renarin matter-of-factly, picking up a more ornamental set with delicately inlaid patterns for him to mess with instead. He looked disappointed by the loss of the fire-arm, but accepted the substitute happily enough.

He looked up at her. “S’pretty arm,” he informed her solemnly, patting the one she’d given him, “but fire’s prettier.”

...Storms, her baby cousin was Jasnah’s favorite person.

* * *

The screaming was an immediate indicator that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

She spun immediately, pressing a finger into a small amethyst set into the top of her arm. A foot-long, razor-sharp blade extended from her wrist as she rushed towards the source of the noise.

She rushed by a Makabaki man with a scar on his cheek and another man she didn’t have time to process, who moved aside for the woman with a foot-long blade protruding from her arm.

She rounded the corner and hesitated.

Her shadows were being pulled  _ towards _ the Stormlight lamps on the wall.

A shadow in the intersection up ahead stirred, then  _ stood, _ taking the form of a man of prismatic blackness, as though he were of some liquid painted with a veneer of oil. He unsheathed a sword as he strode towards Jasnah.

Jasnah pressed a vein on her arm and the matching gem set into her blade’s base, and the sword lit on fire with a soft  _ whumph _ . She met the thing’s glare and brandished her blade.

It stepped back. Satisfaction curled in Jasnah’s gut as she stepped forward menacingly, doing her best to hide the terror pounding just under her veneer of icy calm.

The wall lamp nearest Jasnah went dark, its Stormlight consumed by an unseen source.

Then the palace disintegrated into millions of glass beads.

She fell along with the beads through an unfamiliar dark sky as the strange being--defying gravity as he floated where he had stood before--sheathed his sword, still looking down at her.

She crashed into a sea of those strange glass beads as the others that had formed the palace rained down around her.

* * *

Being Radiant hadn’t magically grown her a pair of flesh-and-blood arms. 

Frankly, Jasnah was relieved. She wouldn’t know what to do with “normal” arms if she had them. Being able to  _ feel  _ with her arms as easily as she could with other parts of her body seemed like it would be strange and unsettling, too much sensory input. Besides that, she rather liked her self-made arms. Flesh and blood couldn’t set things on fire or stab things with a flick of the wrist, among other abilities she had in her casings.

It had changed some things, though. She  _ could  _ feel with her arms now--not much, not enough to be overwhelming, but she definitely had some sensation. Her range of motion was slightly more limited, because she knew how arms weren’t supposed to bend. She didn’t have any more odd “glitches,” either; before, her joints would sometimes stop moving, or a fabrial she’d laced into her arms would malfunction. Now everything worked perfectly as intended on the first try.

Most importantly, she could still remove her arms without having to deal with them trying to stitch themselves back on. That would have been bad.

* * *

 

The girl’s eyes caught on her arms, and Jasnah saw her stifle a gasp. She held back her own sigh. Every  _ single  _ time a girl came to petition for wardship, there was that moment of shock as they found out that--surprise, surprise--Jasnah’s arms being intricate fabrials was  _ not  _ an elaborate joke.

Admittedly, what she was  _ not  _ expecting was for the girl to follow up with a soft, “Oh, Brightness, those are  _ amazing. _ ” The girl’s eyes widened. “How were they made? How did you make them so beautiful, they’re  _ stunning _ .”

Logically, Jasnah knew the girl was probably flattering her, trying to convince Jasnah to take her on by showing interest in her work. That didn’t stop her from preening internally. “Flattery will get you nowhere, child,” she said out loud, extending her right arm to allow the girl--what was her name, Shallan? Shallan Davar, yes--to examine it as she continued working with her left. “I made them myself with years of practice.”

“That, that’s  _ incredible _ , Brightness,” Shallan said, mouth opening in awe, “and I don’t mean this to, to get in your good graces, it truly  _ is _ incredible. Could you perhaps teach me how you made them?”

Jasnah blinked slowly. “You are presuming that I will teach you at all,” she said. “Your wardship has not been accepted, child. This is only an interview.”

That seemed to ground Shallan. She blinked in surprise, stiffening and drawing back from her examination. “What? But I--it took me so long to  _ find  _ you! Wasn’t that the challenge?”

Jasnah kept her face impassive. “No.” She began to collect her materials. “And I don’t have time for wards now anyways. I have my own research to do, my own projects. Find another woman; there are plenty of clever ones in this city.” 

She left the girl standing open-mouthed behind her.

Later, she found that same girl curled up in a nook she’d  _ specifically  _ reserved, sketches scattered around her and a letter placed on top of a pile of books.

A point in Shallan Davar’s favor: she was just stubborn enough to make Jasnah accept her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> catch us on tungle dot hellscape dot gov @pachimew, @alyssum-loves-the-cosmere, and @be-gay-do-tax-fraud

**Author's Note:**

> catch us on tungle dot hellscape dot gov @pachimew and @be-gay-do-tax-fraud
> 
> to be continued, if we ever get around to it


End file.
